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Show HN: Open-source conversational platform and unified messaging APIs

airy.co

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Re: Show HN: Open-source conversational platform and unified messaging APIs

#21

Post by skandergarroum »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #13
skandergarroum wrote: post #2

Hey HN! After four years of development, we are happy to share Airy with you. Airy is an Open Source Conversational Platform to store, structure and utilize conversational data in a secure and privacy-compliant way. With Airy, you can integrate with Conversational AI like Rasa to train smarter models based on actual conversations. You can host your own open source messaging API to enable your developers to build conv…

Any plans to integrate with Teams?

hey artificialLimbs! Yes, a Teams integration is on the roadmap, as we plan to support all conversational channels and our data model already supports it. We are working our way through potential channels as we speak, the Teams API was in beta until recently.

If you don’t want to wait you can also build your own custom source for Teams in Airy. Take a look at our docs to get started: https://airy.co/docs/core/sources/introduction

We can also jump on a quick tech demo if the need is urgent.

Re: Show HN: Open-source conversational platform and unified messaging APIs

#22

Post by skandergarroum »

ushakov wrote: post #7
skandergarroum wrote: post #2

Hey HN! After four years of development, we are happy to share Airy with you. Airy is an Open Source Conversational Platform to store, structure and utilize conversational data in a secure and privacy-compliant way. With Airy, you can integrate with Conversational AI like Rasa to train smarter models based on actual conversations. You can host your own open source messaging API to enable your developers to build conv…

very nice! congrats i have built a similiar thing in the past, called Dialogflow Gateway ( https://dialogflow.cloud.ushakov.co ), which connects Dialogflow to Web and E-Mail protocols, also open-source check out my gh profile: https://github.com/mishushakov i’d be very happy to hear from you, if you’re interested in joining forces/collaborating :)

Hey there! @Dialogflow Gateway: nice idea and cool showoff cases.

Got some ideas on collaborating, send you an email.

Re: Show HN: Open-source conversational platform and unified messaging APIs

#23

Post by skandergarroum »

jFriedensreich wrote: post #4
skandergarroum wrote: post #2

Hey HN! After four years of development, we are happy to share Airy with you. Airy is an Open Source Conversational Platform to store, structure and utilize conversational data in a secure and privacy-compliant way. With Airy, you can integrate with Conversational AI like Rasa to train smarter models based on actual conversations. You can host your own open source messaging API to enable your developers to build conv…

congrats! excited to check it out. Also kudso to the apache 2.0 this makes it even better.

Thanks jFriedensreich! Yes, we are seeing Apache 2.0 as the gold standard for open source licenses and are happy to use it.

Re: Show HN: Open-source conversational platform and unified messaging APIs

#24

Post by cvwright »

renrutal wrote: post #10

> Airy Enterprise > * E2E Encryption & Storage This worries me, I believe it's unethical and irresponsible to pay-wall privacy features. We live in a world where companies and governments are actively spying and harming those under them.

> We live in a world where companies and governments are actively spying and harming those under them.

Therefore this random company owes you security features for free?

Users wanting free shit is the reason why companies like Google and Facebook are doing all this spying in the first place. Those huge warehouse-size datacenters don't pay for themselves.

Re: Show HN: Open-source conversational platform and unified messaging APIs

#25

Post by shoellinger »

soorajchandran wrote: post #20

Congrats on the launch. We have been using Chatwoot ( https://chatwoot.com/ ) - an open source solution for customer messaging. Great to see all the open source project. How are you differentiating Airy?

Thank you for the question, soorajchandran. We appreciate to see more open source tools in this space and believe that Chatwoot is a great choice when you are primarily looking for a cost efficient alternative to Intercom, Zendesk or basic contact center software with a UI for customer support agents.

What you get with Airy is enterprise-scale conversational infrastructure that can power millions of conversations simultaneously by ingesting messaging events in Apache Kafka, running in a dedicated Kubernetes cluster to stream and process conversational data for a variety of use cases, such as integrating with Conversational AI platforms or storing all your conversations in a data lake to run conversational analytics or train machine learning models based on actual conversations.

In that sense what we do is more like "Segment" for conversational data.

In our approach, we would rather like to integrate with for example live chat plugins provided by Intercom instead of replacing them at companies that already chose Intercom to serve their customers with a live chat plugin on their website or in their mobile apps. Airy also comes with a fully customizable open source live chat plugin and an Inbox UI for human agents, but it's not at the core of what we do.

We believe there is much more value to be gained from utilizing conversational data and we therefore like to integrate and play well with other solutions in the space as we believe that companies should have the freedom to choose the tech stack that best suits their requirements and budget restrictions.

Re: Show HN: Open-source conversational platform and unified messaging APIs

#26

Post by kixiQu »

pascal-holy wrote: post #11
renrutal wrote: post #10

> Airy Enterprise > * E2E Encryption & Storage This worries me, I believe it's unethical and irresponsible to pay-wall privacy features. We live in a world where companies and governments are actively spying and harming those under them.

Hi renrutal, Pascal from Airy here. Encryption is a very important topic for us. Since in all our versions all of the data resides in Apache Kafka and is only exposed via Kafka Streams Apps we are able to take advantage of Kafkas SSL encryption. For encryption-at-rest we use our cloud providers disk encryption. We also support Open ID Connect as an identity layer so we can focus on improving our platform and be assur…

Is that E2E, though? I'm not Kafka-knowledgeable, but that sounds like it's encrypted as it gets to your servers and encrypted as it rests on them -- not encrypted all the way between people sending messages.

Re: Show HN: Open-source conversational platform and unified messaging APIs

#27

Post by chrismatic »

ROARosen wrote: post #19
skandergarroum wrote: post #2

Hey HN! After four years of development, we are happy to share Airy with you. Airy is an Open Source Conversational Platform to store, structure and utilize conversational data in a secure and privacy-compliant way. With Airy, you can integrate with Conversational AI like Rasa to train smarter models based on actual conversations. You can host your own open source messaging API to enable your developers to build conv…

Hi, looks very promising. I would totally consider switching to this streamlined approach to business conversations. However, I don't see any mention of email. Email is IMHO vital for any service that wishes to 'integrate' the full company conversation stack. Do you plan on adding additional integrations?

This is a great point! Email is and will remain _the_ messaging use case for any business. I've created a ticket for adding email as a messaging source so you can track the progress: https://github.com/airyhq/airy/issues/1953

And yes we do plan on adding more sources and are therefore listening to the community to learn which are most in-demand. So thank you very much for the feedback!

Re: Show HN: Open-source conversational platform and unified messaging APIs

#28

Post by junon »

cvwright wrote: post #24
renrutal wrote: post #10

> Airy Enterprise > * E2E Encryption & Storage This worries me, I believe it's unethical and irresponsible to pay-wall privacy features. We live in a world where companies and governments are actively spying and harming those under them.

> We live in a world where companies and governments are actively spying and harming those under them. Therefore this random company owes you security features for free? Users wanting free shit is the reason why companies like Google and Facebook are doing all this spying in the first place. Those huge warehouse-size datacenters don't pay for themselves.

> Therefore this random company owes you security features for free?

Yes.

Re: Show HN: Open-source conversational platform and unified messaging APIs

#29

Post by donpark »

renrutal wrote: post #10

> Airy Enterprise > * E2E Encryption & Storage This worries me, I believe it's unethical and irresponsible to pay-wall privacy features. We live in a world where companies and governments are actively spying and harming those under them.

I'd agree in general for consumer use-cases but not for business use-cases. With an open source business tool that may be used in non-business context, charging for features required for business use makes sense.

Even among consumer use-cases, lack of privacy may be a feature. In spatial chat, for example, being in able to overhear conversation within 'earshot' is a feature. Selling private space in that context makes sense and similar to selling improved voice quality, at least to me, and there are stark operational cost boundaries in the involved tech that can complicates the picture.

Re: Show HN: Open-source conversational platform and unified messaging APIs

#30

Post by chrismatic »

9dev wrote: post #17

In my previous job I was the lead engineer of the MessengerPeople Unified Messaging API, so congrats, this looks awesome! :) I wonder how you solved media files and attachments? I remember having major headaches around transporting, storing and retrieving media files for different messaging backends, especially WhatsApp and Telegram. Also, any plans to support WhatsApp Business containers directly?

Hi, Chris from Airy here. Glad that you like it!

Yes this was a very challenging problem. After many iterations we came to the conclusion that in general it's best to have no opinion on the structure of the content that is being sent. So we store every message exactly as we receive it and do platform specific file interactions in a separate stream. We then store the results in a metadata topic and use that to render messages on-demand. This immutable approach makes retrying and storage migrations easy and safe.

Regarding WhatsApp Business containers we are still waiting for them to wrap up their Beta. Currently we support WhatsApp and SMS via our Twilio messaging source (https://airy.co/docs/core/sources/whatsapp-twilio), but we definitely plan on making it a first class citizen.

Hope I could answer your questions! :)

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